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124262-fantasy-and-sci-fi-in-wildstar
Content ---- I really prefer Fantasy strictly most of the time, but hybrids are fine and I do love scifi, just not as much. I prefer medieval, dragons, what have you. | |} ---- ---- ---- So glad you asked... :p I'm first going to bounce back what you've already proposed, cause it works really well: This is how I feel in general. To be more specific, I tend to draw a distinction between pulp and speculative sci-fi. Pulp is stuff that has to do with what scares us but is largely incomprehensible or inhuman. So scary aliens, terrible robots that make no sense, etc. Starship Troopers is a great example of what I think this side does best in entertainment— a fun romp that uses speculative premises only as backdrops for an otherwise typical goodguys-badguys story. Generally focuses mostly on action and graphics. Speculative is the stuff that puts a mirror to civilization. Generally this genre can cover writers like Wyndham, Clark, Gibson, maybe Herbert, and I guess 'looser' sci-fi from writers like Atwood, Ghosh, or PKD. Typically I'd say cyberpunk (but not Shadowrun) and dystopia are what mainstreamed some of the ideas of speculative into film and games. Then there's stuff like Star Trek, or space opera from Star Wars, which I think lie somewhere between pulp and speculative. In this case I'd be tempted to give Star Wars as an example of pulp (traditional storytelling to reinforce traditional beliefs), whereas Star Trek TNG would be more speculative (didactic, attempts to explore nuance, introspective). It's hard to apply these ideas to games though, I get most of it from books. It's really really hard to develop a game that can properly provide a speculative experience. I can't imagine trying to play A Scanner Darkly: Arctor's Revenge. :lol: So I guess what I want more from Wildstar, in terms of sci-fi, is visual/thematic stuff. More dark cities, big holoscreens, glowing lasers, gleaming metals, etc. For story, like strain and all that, I'm really not sure what they could do if the game is intended to be fun and not depressing. ^_^ | |} ---- I think your sub-genres are pretty solid, though I tend to feel SW tends to fit the space opera to a tee (damn the science, we've got a mythic archetypes to plunder for booty). If you want Wildstar to reach speculation and the nuance found in other examples, we're going to have to have a revolution in MMO quest and storyline writing. It'd be a revolution I'd be happy to see, but you'll still end up with people who get to the end and say WS had a terrible story because they couldn't be arsed to read the text ;-). If there's a way to combine nuanced acting and or writing in a concise way with superb solo play story goals, well... won't that be something. And no, no one in the genre does this yet that I've seen, not WoW, not GW2, not WS -- maybe GW2 came closer with the personal storyline but it still has issues today as it's impossible to keep it up to date. Probably the closest thing to a more in-depth SF storyline that I know of to date would be Mass Effect, and even THAT runs into trouble because you still have plot rails that cannot adapt to the wilder choices made by fans over the course of three titles and came down to 2 (no 3!) fairly binary choices that satisfied few. And that was in a SOLO title. Adapting such mechanics to a MMORPG is a herculean task. On the plus side for you, visuals (in general) are a LOT easier. Just takes an artist to draw something weird and cool :-). On the downside, since Nexus is being settled, big cities might be a skosh hard to come by. However the universe is (hopefully) a weird and wonderful place, and there've got to be gritty SF cities someplace. Here, mixing with your other thread, how about a veteran Shiphand for Exiles where you are tasked by the Black Hoods to infiltrate a Dominion city that's down on its luck, arriving in the dark in the rain, navigating a small section of a city that's seen better years (doesn't show up on the Dominion tourist brochures for sure), shaking down an informant, breaking into a secret facility, stealing documents, and escaping. And for the Dominion, I dunno, maybe something else (I'm an Exile, @#$ those guys ;-) why should I come up with a cool idea for them?) | |} ---- ---- ---- WildStar is unabashedly a Science Fiction/Fantasy hybrid, which gives it a lot of leeway as far as developing fun content goes. Personally, though, I think the trope of the the endgame being dominated by corruption, where the creatures and landscape are warped by contagion, undead, twisted magic or dark force energy is overdone, and I'd really like to see some more traditional science fiction content, like having the factions invade one another's arcships, or other content off-planet. | |} ---- The only bit that throws me about the presence of magic in the game, is that, from what I've seen of it, it only exists for the Spellslinger class, and even then apparently purely because "space wizard cowboy" is cooler than just "space cowboy". Seriously, even the Stalker's invisibility is explained-away as nanotech cloaking and such, so why suddenly have the Spellslingers use "Void Magic" and "Sigils" rather than calling it something like "Forcefield Manipulation" and "Eldan Data Matrixes" or something, or even take a page from Mass Effect's playbook when they made "biotics" and just refer to it as a kind of psionics... (Frankly, if ANY class has a playstyle/abilities befitting the term "magic", it's Espers, not Spellslingers.) It stands out like the proverbial sore thumb, and is just really kinda grating in an otherwise awesome sci-fi setting to have this one solitary and arguably-unnecessary magical aspect... like if you were reading the Harry Potter books and his final confrontation with Voldemort suddenly ended with an unexplained and unremarkable-to-other-characters Gundam battle. | |} ---- Well, it's the only current class that has abilities couched in "magic terms," although Espers do magic damage as well, and at one stage in beta, both Espers and Spellslingers had "mana" as their class resource. There were other classes planned that didn't make it to launch (Charmer, Elementalist, Flux Reaver, Shadow Monk) There's speculation that Shadow Monk was the original name for the Stalker, but the other 3 sound like they could have been magic-using classes. Also, Primal Energy is treated a lot like magic (many primal attacks do magic damage, as well). NPC races, like the Skeech, Moodies, Osun, Pell, Falkrin and Torine Sisterhood have casters who channel primal energy, and there are elementals, spirits and the rune system (which are also primal energy based, and use the same terms that are used in fantasy games for the same kinds of things). Not to mention that many of the dungeon bosses and mobs feel more like they're from fantasy than science fiction. To be honest, it seems like there's an awful lot of magic in the game. | |} ---- So much this ("sore thumb"). To avoid the anaphylactic shock from the allergy I've developed to Swords & Sorcery games in my head I redefine Spellslingers as psionically active individuals that require certain totems (runes and sigils) to function. please make it stop... | |} ---- Probably could have just had gunslingers be a ranged tech damage class and rewritten the bits dealing with "spells" in a less fantasy way to be perfectly honest. Having 3 damage source types does certainly complexify the damage and mitigation and maybe that's a good thing, or maybe that's a headache for itemization. I think it's probably a fine balancing point. I don't think I agree that Espers are more "magical" than Spellslingers, though I can't argue for them being less either. If it were my choice to make I think I would have indeed gone with the psionics route. There are good models for this in SF lit (particularly Julian May's work, breaking it into creativity, coercion, redaction (healing), PK, far-sensing). Still we have what we have and I do share with you a slight antipathy towards sword and board games anymore. Give me the tools of excited and amplified energy and mass to play with :-) | |} ---- ---- I don't mind it being a damage type, it's the fact that "magic" as a power thing exists only for one class, and arguably the wrong one, when the lore could easily be redefined to identify that class' abilities as some other more-sci-fi-appropriate thing. Agreed - the fluff just doesn't work. Arbitrarily dumping magic in an otherwise firmly-sci-fi setting... well, it fits about as well as having Darth Vader summon demons or something. | |} ---- Well it's all relative like I said originally. Go to a SF/Fantasy con and ask a panel of 100 fans what SF and Fantasy means to them and you'll probably get 1000 opinions (because people will alter their definitions as they remember various media that they loved). An extremely solid argument can be made that Star Wars is pure fantasy. Lucas took sword fighting, mixed in WW2 aerial dogfighting, slapped the whole business into mythic archetypes, set it in space and called it good. And it was good for what it was. It's a hugely fun story world. It's not what you'd call hard science fiction though. I think the attempt to work out how the Force works with midicl... whatever... think that was largely a mistake. If you're going to create that world with such a soft background, own it and live with it. It's freeing in a way. (I have the same sensation about that movie Wanted about the mystical assassins. Lots of fun impossible crap, and then they ruin it by overexplaining where they get their targets which is a thousand year old loom that prints out ASCII characters. As an embedded engineer, I'm probably overly aware of the history of ASCII and it ruined it.) So... just being in space, does that make it science fiction? To me, no. To others, yeah. It's a vrey fuzzy line. Now does everything need to be hard SF where we're dissecting the physics of the sun, theorizing about lifeforms that might live in the magnetic fields, etc, or delving into the possible scientific means of the extinction of the human race, and how impossible space travel is (two Brin examples -- very solid hard SF writer)? Nah. Works for a story, and the second is just ultimately fairly depressing, but not all SF needs to be there. So... the line is fuzzy and it's not all the way over to the "hard" side. Getting closer but I think this is about as close as you can get. I think Wildstar is firmly in the SF genre, but would be slightly happier with a little less trappings of "magic". But, not like it's stopping me from playing either :-). I just would have liked calling Espers outright psionics, and maybe doing something with spell slingers that's ... hell call it elements based or something. I dunno. "Spell" is just very evocative. (Not even going to get into Technomancers who routinely call their code jiggering "spells" and evoking real "daemons", etc. That's a really weird crossover :-) -- fun cross over though) | |} ---- This is the part that bothers me most right now. Every time I think about queuing for dungeons or adventures, it boils down to whether or not I feel like playing a fantasy game. :( I've started thinking that Nexus is actually what 'causes' most of the fantasy. It's a good question, though I'll ask you to expand on "in essence they're exactly the same thing". It's easy to say that in essence everything is exactly the same, should you want to simplify that much. :P To answer your own challenge though, I'll lean on Miriam Allen deFord's concise explanation: "Science fiction deals with improbable possibilities, fantasy with plausible impossibilities" Basically, sci-fi deals with stuff that could happen (based on what we know through scientific evidence) but likely won't. Fantasy, however, deals with stuff that could not happen (shooting fireballs from hands through willpower or some inner mysticism, talking beasts that don't have the physical anatomy to actually talk, etc.), but which we are capable of believing without the presence of evidence— I would say mostly due to the power of 'suspension of disbelief', and the weight of myth/symbolism's connection to religious belief and traditional culture. deFord's explanation isn't immune to criticism, since genre is always a little subjective. But I think she's provided a good, general guideline. edited to clarify a bit | |} ---- ---- Well, like I said, it's really the only current class that is described that way. If Carbine is going to release classes in the future, we might find out that the Elementalist, Charmer and Flux Reaver (and Shadow Monk, if it's not what became the Stalker) also have a "magic" feel to them. An Elementalist, or other channeler of primal energy, would fit right in, since there are NPC races that do the same thing. | |} ---- ---- ---- ---- This is from the new Adventure? :( So somebody cut-n-paste some techy sounding words into a Fantasy template. It's like listening to somebody who constantly utters malapropisms. I think my soul just withered. | |} ---- Honestly, this does get done. In fact, having thought about it a while, Wildstar owes a lot more to Star Wars than anything else. It gets muddied in Wildstar, but I think a lot of what they're doing is based on the Star Wars theme. Essentially, that is a fantasy story set in the future using technology instead of (mostly) magic. I remember having this discussion a long time ago, that the Star Wars crew is essentially a Warrior, a Paladin, a Rogue, and an Elven Princess coming together and then joining a pitched battle later. If it was set in a fantasy setting, it would have been perfect. They just set it in a futuristic setting (though not nominally the future). However, Star Wars kind of blends this in a relatively seamless way. Wildstar very intentionally is NOT seamless. Wildstar is what would happen if Guy Ritchie or Quentin Tarantino directed Star Wars. Random blasts from other sources and genres just hammer it from all sides. You've got cyberpunk, steampunk, western, horror, and those are just a few major influences. That doesn't even get into the bits taken from its other myriad sources. It leaves the whole ensemble a bit jumbled. Which is fun, in a way, because it keeps you on your toes. The only downside is a lack of focus that results from not having a fully central vision. But at least it's variable and entertaining. In a game struggling to not take itself too seriously in a climate of games that are taking themselves WAY too seriously, I think it comes out as a net win for Wildstar. And, of course, you can always roll Dominion if you want to minimize the randomness. The Exiles seem to have a lot more of that randomness jammed in on every side; the Dominion in play comes off as a pretty straightforward fantasy kingdom. | |} ---- Oh no, it's been around for a very long time. Most explicit reference I can think of right now is they showed up in Babylon 5 in 1994 in "The Geometry of Shadows" (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZjToVZTqCbw). The RPG Shadowrun additionally has a lot of fantasy/cyberpunk crossover notions that are not dissimilar though not quite as explicit as the Technomage :-). Had to edit: On a more recent note, Charles Stross's The Laundry series crosses computer science geeks with necromancers in a very fun way (a dash of Lovecraft, more than a dash of Ian Fleming, a dash of all of Jonathan Coulton's songs). Not strictly the Technomage, but pretty close in a more modern setting. | |} ---- Oh you were talking about the theme in general *stops hyperventilating* I really liked B5 -- the Ivanova gets pissed monologue at Earth's Shadow enhanced ships is one of my favorites -- but the Technomancer concept was just poor. Not surprising considering that they used Harlan Ellison as a creative consultant. There's a lot I like about SR too but the magic bits of their lore always grated on me. It is possible to achieve the "indistinguishable from magic" feel yet have a hard sci-fi basis. I think Richard K. Morgan's Takeshi Kovacs novels (Altered Carbon, etc.) And the Eclipse Phase RPG's lore do a really good job of this without the handwavey bits of orcs, elves and totemic magic. | |} ---- I think Wildstar even tries to touch on something a bit beyond; that technology is divinity. There's constant reference, especially to the Dominion, about the Eldan being like gods. In fact, the Eldan make numerous observations that some of their own members believe themselves to be like gods. They created whole planets and whole forms of life, and lived through generations and generations of their projects. Which, of course, raises the question of the eternal clockmaker that the Deists espoused a few hundred years ago. Is divinity to be found in science and technology? We have already, as humans here on Earth, created life forms in environments where they aren't presently aware of our existence as we observe them in tightly controlled conditions. The Eldan seemed to want to create a being that would be a god. So what is divinity? If it's eternal life, the power over life and death, the ability to make worlds and life, were the Eldan gods in practice? | |} ---- ---- And this is why SF is fun. Letting you explore the big questions while occasionally blowing up a hamster :-) | |} ---- That reminds me of Jack Vance's Dying Earth. The setting is in the far-future when our sun has turned into a red giant and the Earth has experienced several apocalyptic events so science and math skillz are a bit fuzzier than they should be. Mages would memorize complicated mathematical equations that they'd express to attempt to cause the effect they intend. If they didn't quite get it right hilarity ensued. Oh and because they were so complicated, using it would erase it from the mage's mind. :blink: <_< Decades of D&D stuck in that idiotic spell selection mechanic because Vance (and Gygax) thought "math is hard". | |} ---- Dirty Vancian spell mechanics. We had a similar problem is shadowrun for decker programs until the writers looked at Moore's law, and realized that you probably had enough storage to hold all the programs you owned. Spells per day has always been junk. I started playing warlocks in D&D just for the ability to throw a ball of fire as many times per day as I wanted. | |} ---- I first got into SR from the SGenesis game, then the SNES game. I really loved everything about it and although the tech/grit/gangs were what really got me, the magic side was fun too. And the explanation seemed cool and reasonable at the time (if I remember correctly it's some kind of magical return or cycle based on a Mayan prophecy, which caused humans to mutate into orcs/etc., and allowed manipulation of magical forces once more). But when I started to read Gibson and realized how much of SR was taken from his work, it was a bit shocking. I've always found this snippet from Wikipedia to be funny: is also influenced by the writings of William Gibson (particularly Neuromancer).[6 Gibson, who gave no permission and expressed strong aversion for mixing his ideas with "spare me, *elves*,"7 reacted as follows to its release: …when I see things like Shadowrun, the only negative thing I feel about it is that initial extreme revulsion at seeing my literary DNA mixed with elves. Somewhere somebody's sitting and saying 'I've got it! We're gonna do William Gibson and Tolkien!' Over my dead body! But I don't have to bear any aesthetic responsibility for it. I've never earned a nickel, but I wouldn't sue them. It's a fair cop. I'm sure there are people who could sue me, if they were so inclined, for messing with their stuff. So it's just kind of amusing.8] Still enjoy SR quite a bit though. :lol: To Vic's question in the spoiler tags, divinity is probably too complex to assess in a "what makes divinity" way... but I'll try to explain my understanding, in the context you've laid out. I would split the idea of god/deity into two distinct interpretations: the omnipotent kind and the 'remarkably more powerful than us' kind. In the case of the former, it wouldn't apply to a race like the Eldan because they're obviously not omnipotent (and I think the idea of omnipotence is absurd anyway). In the case of the latter, although it could apply to Eldan, I think the idea of a deity that isn't omnipotent is pointless, because in that light anything could be a deity to anything else, which causes the word to lose coherence or value. Through that lens, there is no connection between science and divinity. /2cents | |} ---- ---- Spell mechanics have always been a PITA because, eventually, they butt into melee and other ranged endeavors and have to sometimes balance out. So this became the sort of trinity we see today, melee does more damage but at shorter range, range does less damage but at longer range and also takes more damage, and the same applies to magic, but that takes a casting time. Lately, unfortunately, issues of class balance have made this a VERY difficult predicament, because games know players like new classes, but are only interested in limited number ranges. That's why WoW is butting its head against the ceiling, trying desperately to get some kind of idiosyncrasy out of its classes that all have to be capable of nearly the exact same things. It's one of the reasons why I wonder if Wildstar really needs a new class unless it does something drastically different from the others. Who needs another class that maybe has one defining spell or two that others don't have, especially when the differences between the current classes are under fire (Espers and Spellslingers have been moving into the same-product-different-packaging category for a while now). | |} ---- Have the Molly Millions song then. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8WVE47X57qQ | |} ---- at work now, and i can't. but i will :D thx! | |} ---- Is it though? Not all gods throughout history were omnipotent. Certainly, the Greek and Roman gods were very often fooled, having things hidden from sight, only being able to look down from Mount Olympus (and later other locales). The Viking gods had a prophecy of their end, but were very clearly also not all-seeing. There are arguments against the omnipotency of all religious figures; the universe is a petri dish. But the Eldan seemed to certainly rule their own domain. They created an entire planet and seemed to know everything that happened on it. They monitored the evolution of the life forms they built over their existences. They indeed, were as omnipotent as could be, only ever seeming to not know when another of their own was working on something else. In the end, what they lacked and what got them in the end was their inability to know what each other was doing, their own limitations, and their inability to know the future. Those aren't particularly ungodly powers. So maybe divinity is relative. Maybe modern science would have been alchemy and magic five hundred years ago, but we take it for granted now. Hundreds of years prior, to be able to speak to someone through a mirror across the world would have made it enchanted, today we call that electricity and wifi. To destroy cities was something that could only be done with divine power, now we can do it by splitting atoms. It actually wasn't a thousand years ago that reading silently was thought of as an incredible, even mystical, feat. Maybe divinity is just a relative term that seems magical and impossible to us from where we are, but once you get there is just science. We certainly don't marvel at how wondrous our technological progress has been; I was born at a time when cell phones were a novelty. I remember needing a quarter to call my mother from the mall when I needed to be picked up from a date as a kid. I could imagine having my own cell phone one day and the technology being ubiquitous. I did not imagine that, not two decades later, they'd be a perfectly suitable replacement for a laptop computer, with worldwide connection through a routine touch screen. There are people alive today who were alive when that idea applied to cars, that they were novelties. I suppose most times I kind of take for granted what technology like this makes possible. If we took it back a thousand years with us, they probably would think we were gods, or at best wizards. | |} ---- I read Neuromancer about four years ago and it blew me away. The prose is dense, though the language was too technical/modern for me at the time (I was leaving a high fantasy obsession). Read Mona Lisa Overdrive in Fall '14, loved it, realized I was reading the last book of the trilogy... ungh! I'm reading Count Zero now. Fantastic stuff. :D | |} ---- See A. C. Clarke's third law: "Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic." | |} ---- kick ass stuff. but yeah, i think when i read those book i was reading each page twice! still, in the end it turned out to be my best books. count zero is wicked :) voodoo techno style mon ! (which is very "shaman" meets "matrix" in shadowrun) | |} ---- I was gonna say this yesterday. :D It's not really "magic" so much as "technology so advanced that your tiny brain can not comprehend it." That's one of the arguments we had back in The Day about opening up ESPer to the Mechari. People were all like "but robots don't have brains!" and I was all like "Yeah, but they have resonant crystals, specifically coded to mimic the function of a meat brain" ... so given that the Progenitors were way, way smarter than our characters, why couldn't they have programmed some Mechari to harness those "psionic wavelengths" just like a biological organism? I mark the Spellslinger "spells" up to the same kind of thing. It ain't actual MAGIC. It's a science that we just don't fully understand - a set of rules that have to be followed, with the proper runes and movements, in order to activate or access the powers at hand. "Magic" comes from mystical beings like gods or demons or angels. I haven't seen anything in Wildstar that makes me think that "supernatural powers" are in play - merely powers we don't or can't yet comprehend fully. | |} ---- Although they are using a variation on classical elements that are very much tied to magic and not science. :lol: Wildstar's fun like that. High end Eldan science managed to prove that the Ancient Greeks were right all along! | |} ---- Well, "classical elements" to us mere Earth-bound mortals. I am reminded of both the Thor movies and the Stargate franchise. Both show highly advanced "Gods" who were, in reality, just powerful beings with highly advanced technology on their side. So advanced that when they encountered early humans, we freaked out and said, "Wow, those guys must be gods because there is no way they could shoot beams of light (or lightning or fire or whatever) unless they were from the Great Beyond!" | |} ---- That's my point though, without omnipotence, what's a god? A powerful creature? A creator? Something that manipulates lesser beings? These qualities can apply to plenty of beings (like ourselves) that are certainly not considered gods by any standard definition. So I dislike using qualities like these as indications of 'divinity' because they just lead to subjective labels, rather than ontological examinations. The idea that what we have now would be considered magic to previous generations is neat, but that's all it is to me, harmless fun. I don't think it's useful as a way of looking at the world. Just because a cell phone would be inexplicable to a caveman doesn't make it magic. Similarly, the things that shaman and druids might have done that they considered magic, was not actually magic, nor would it necessarily lead to science. This requires a definition of magic though. My own would be: Something that is inexplicable and impossible. Otherwise, from a few statements made by others here, magic is just science that hasn't been explained, which doesn't add up for me. If I proclaim a hypothesis and begin testing for proof, nobody (that I know) would call it "magic" until it becomes science. Science is method leading to tactical conclusions we can apply to the real world, often through empiricism. Magic is belief, and I would say, entirely symbolic like divinity. | |} ---- That's a modern concept, though. Remember that there was a time that Astronomy was Astrology, Chemistry was Alchemy, and there were no dividing lines between the magical and scientific. For a thousand years people believed that geometry was the language of God. You can see this when you see gothic cathedrals. For the entire Rennaissance, it was thought that you could use perfect geometries to decipher the language of the heavens. It was thought that the circle or sphere was the most heavenly of symbols, and so it was elevated high above the altar. At first, they had a large aisle because they also had a procession to accomodate, but they later rectified this. After Keplar's ideas about the heavens being governed by ellipses was less rejected, you see elliptical churches being built, with the altar as one "focus". So magic and divine only became the "inexplicable" when we came to somewhat look down on people who held those beliefs. However, you'll notice something about "magic" as it's written. It's science. It's completely explainable in its own context when it's written. Even back into the earliest days it was written about, magic was based on complex sets of formulas, on items of power that inherited qualities because of where they came from. Witchcraft was written down in "spellbooks" because you needed certain elements to do it and spells had to be cast a certain way. Alchemy was a magic that attempted to make man immortal and to turn common metals to gold. Now that we understand more, we're actually moving towards achieving exactly these goals. These were the definition of magic, and yet they're going to become a very plausible reality. Which puts things in perspective. How many magical spells are now at our disposal? If magic is everything that is not explainable, it's all relative. I can't explain spatial warps. We don't know how to reliably produce them yet. Are they therefore magic, and will lose the distinction if we ever learn to do them? And isn't that then simply relative to our understanding of the universe and our own technological capabilities? It's food for thought that one day, if we create a universe, and that universe begets life which we observe, we would be very literally the gods we imagined. Very much the way the Eldan seemed to struggle with the idea of divinity and godhood, their technology gave them the means to be gods to their own creations in a very literal and direct sense. So were they, then, gods because of their great technological achievements? As an aside, the omnipotence of gods in a heavenly, rather than a view-over-their-creation-sense, isn't really that common. That begets the further question. If we create a lab culture from proteins (as we have, we have been biologically synthesizing bacteria for about four or five years now) and watch that culture grow in a petri dish under a microscope, are we also, then, divine? We are looking into a new biological, sentient, reproducing creation, casting our eye across all they can discern and observe, and they cannot discern our presence. Sure, it's a bacteria, not a person, but is that us turning the divine and arcane into the mundane? | |} ---- Clarke's Law: Sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic. | |} ---- Clarke wasn't talking about magic in Science Fiction. He was talking about reality (as he was with the first two laws) - assuming supernatural forces don't actually exist. Granted, a Science Fiction universe can operate that way, but it's not a definition of what magic is in Science Fiction. Even if you want to apply Clarke's 3rd Law, magic in WildStar isn't any more advanced and mysterious than the technology that's available to the inhabitants of the WildStar universe - I mean, there are people who know how to cast spells - so it doesn't really fit Clarke's 3rd law. The "magic" that Clarke was talking about is something that is well beyond what we understand through current technology and science that can be explainable with advances in technology and science. People who are used to being teleported around the arcship by technology aren't mystified about Spellslingers charging their sigils. Magic in the WildStar universe is simply not "sufficiently advanced" enough to be what Clarke is talking about in his 3rd Law. Also, magic in fantasy obeys understandable laws. It may be fickle or dangerous, but the means of manipulating it are well-understood by those who do. That seems more like magic in WildStar than some form of advanced technology. Magic in WildStar is, essentially, manipulating Primal Power and the Void - which is pretty much the stock definition of magic in any number of pure fantasy genre games/novels. It's just accepted by the denizens of the WildStar universe that magic exists as a force that doesn't exist in our universe. | |} ---- | |} ---- ---- |} Well, that's the point I'm making. The entire idea behind divinity is that we were created by some omnipotent being of unimaginable power that created our universe and can see all the parts of it, though it exists outside our realm of understanding. You see everything from solely our perspective, but the point here is that we have been at that point already. So the argument is, "What is divinity?" Because we have occupied exactly the same position, but at far smaller scales. Which then makes "divinity" a relative term. The idea that we cannot be "gods" is related to an idea about godhood and scale. That's why the Eldan are such a critical element in Nexus's story. Several of them began to believe they were gods, but most simply thought they were scientists and scoffed at the very notion of godhood. Yet they occupied exactly that position. And at the same time, they were attempting to "create" a "god" because they themselves, even in the position of revered deity to races all over the galaxy, wanted to attain a fundamental power over all of creation. So their bar for godhood rose. Remember that people literally DID believe alchemy was magic (and for that reason clergy were banned from researching it in the 1300s, right up until the Enlightenment). People viewed astology the same way; there was a period when science and magic were by and large the same thing. The idea of magic only being aspects somehow unexplainable to science is relatively more modern, but it's inaccurate. To this day, we have no understanding of what actually causes gravity. We understand it exists, we understand how to calculate it as a function of mass, and we can put it into practice, but we have no idea how it is actually caused. We have theories, but no proof. It's still not "magic", though, which it would be if all things we couldn't understand were magic. So what is a God? You are postulating that Gods can't come to being from technology because it has to be effortless for them? How do we define effort? Do we believe that all stories whereby gods had to exert effort (Christian creationism, for example, paints it as a bit more than a flick of the wrist, and even God had to rest for an entire day afterwards) paint them as not gods? And, in fact, it doesn't take us an awful lot of effort to set up a petri dish, generate bateria from cell growth, and let them multiply. Would you not be a god then just because the life you create is insignificant and doesn't have your mental capacity? That argument was the center of European religious thought for millenia, that God has a macroscopic plan you can't possibly understand with your tiny, insignificant, limited human intelligence. Wildstar asks a lot of these questions because, in the end, the Eldan actually had characteristics of many gods. They lived in a different place, observing and interacting with the galaxy through a race they directly built to serve, employing a chosen race of people to spread their word through the galaxy. They were certainly gods to the Cassians, and had ample power to prove it. Some of them even believed it. But at the same time, they themselves were more cognizant of their own limitations. They wanted to create a God because, for the most part, they understood themselves to not be gods, even when an entire galaxy believed them to be. So we're at the point where you might be the all-seeing, all-knowing creator of a world of bacteria, and you'd absolutely be their god. You just feel bacteria aren't significant enough to make us so, even though the entire point behind a god is that they would occupy the same space above us. And that's only the Abrahamaic definition we follow predominantly in Europe and North America. Gods in other traditions, The Greco-Roman, Norse, Pagan, these weren't nearly in as lofty of positions. The Eldan might not have been "God", but they could absolutely have been seen in the position of gods. Most religions don't paint divine beings the same way our historical ancestors did. In fact, the Eldan's own religion (recall they named the primevals after their cultures historical divine beings, which were numerous in nature and seemed to be arranged in a pantheon). It does raise the question, though, because although you might consider our bacteria in a petri dish to grant us unsatisfactory divinity, it could very well be that the whole of the observable universe that you can see is just the ever-expanding nourishing solution on a petri dish for some intelligence which created our whole universe sees you as precisely as insignificant. It's a little humbling to think that scales of time could easily mean our universe is just some experiment being run and "God" could just be some cosmic molecular biochemist trying to get this experiment hurried up before his lunch break. It's all relative. It just feels like it discredits the idea of our own achievements as a race of people that we're accomplishing things that would have been, quite literally, magic. We can have conversations through televisions; that's very literally an old magic staple of having enchanted mirrors that can allow wizards to communicate across vast distances. | |} ----